Saving time in the kitchen

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Everyone who comes to our restaurant wants to get freshly cooked food, which means we need to get it out to them quickly. That means we need to have great systems in place to help us produce our dishes as quickly as possible. We have some great suppliers who support us with prepared vegetables and other partially cooked ingredients so that we can get our great tasting meals out to our customers as soon as possible. I thought it would be fun to start a blog with all of our food service hacks, as I know commercial kitchens all have and need them.

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Commercial point of sale (POS) systems are common fixtures in the modern hospitality industry. POS systems are often preferred over traditional-style cash registers thanks to their advanced features.

Because POS systems are often not cheap, it is important for players in the hospitality industry to ensure that they get value for their money when they decide to invest in a POS system. Here are three features that a restaurant owner should not sacrifice when shopping for a commercial point of sale system.

Customer Support

The importance of the "customer support" feature in a POS system should not be taken to imply that the system is destined to fail. Perhaps this reasoning explains the common misconception that a more advanced point of sale system is one that would not need as much customer support.

POS system manufacturers recognize and appreciate that the average restaurant owner is not likely to be an IT guru. Customer support is their way of making it easy and convenient (as it should be) for the owner to use the manufacturer's product.

A large number of restaurants operate late into the night and others operate throughout the night. Before investing in a POS system, it is important for a restaurant owner to confirm that he or she will get technical help in the event of technical problems at midnight (for example) on a busy week night.

Compliance With The PCI DSS

PCI DSS is an abbreviation for Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard. The PCI DSS is a set of minimum requirements spelt out for commercial entities that allow their clients to pay for goods and/or services using their credit cards.

The objective of enforcing these requirements is to guarantee the security of financial information that individuals share whenever they use their credit cards for payment transactions.

The use of non-compliant POS systems in a restaurant would leave customers exposed to the risk of identity theft and that of credit card fraud.

The Cloud

Cloud-based systems are perhaps the future of POS systems. A cloud-based point of sale system offers significant advantages over the conventional hardwired system. These advantages include, but they're not limited to, the following:

24 hour access to sales data so long as there's an active internet connection

Reduced threat of data loss due to technical problems with the system. Cloud-based POS systems store data online as opposed to using hard-drives for data storage

The possibility of centralized data management for multiple establishments (restaurants) located in different geographical areas.